Author Archive for Alexis Hauk

“For me, stand-up comedy is a lot like sex,” says the freckled comic behind the microphone at Dupont Circle’s Townhouse. He pauses while a few people chuckle at the crowded bar. “It’s super awkward for everyone involved, you’re going to laugh at me the whole time, and it’s only going to last about three minutes.”
This has [...]

NobblyCarrot7
It's a classic story. Boy meets girl. Girl likes boy. Girl begins trolling him hardcore on the Internet.
In a cute little romance involving vegetables and raves, protagonist Ruby is a plucky redhead miraculously undeterred by the fact that she lives with her comatose-level depressed mother and has one of the most awkward jobs in the [...]

Tonight marks the sophomore effort of one of the least subtly named new theater companies in D.C.: the Rainbow Theatre Project. It's a new LGBT performing arts company finding its footing in its very first season. If the name seems like a throwback to the early symbols and slogans of the gay rights movement, well, [...]

Back after a four-year hiatus, Brightest Young Things' Bentzen Ball comedy festival is named after a Danish man named Ole Bentzen who laughed himself to death while watching A Fish Called Wanda. But when the event kicks off tonight at the Lincoln Theatre, featuring curator Tig Notaro along with Doug Benson, Wyatt Cenac, Heather Lawless, and others, [...]

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars and directs Don Jon, a comedy about a porn-obsessed gym rat on a quest for love, which hits theaters Sept. 27. The trailer has certainly been cut to entice—who doesn’t love a Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch sing-a-long? But the fact is that many will cough up money to see it [...]

I'm not sure why shorts so often turn to overwrought drama, because they lend themselves so much better to comedic sketches and jokes with slow-build punchlines. DC Shorts' Showcase 10 presents some great examples of when that works. Its strongest material appeals to those of us who prefer stories with more than a little bite [...]

Most of the films in DC Shorts' Showcase 3 seem to try in their own idealistic way to illuminate a problem in the world, whether the problem is social anxiety or homophobia or income inequality. As you might guess, that makes a lot of this sequence feel overloaded with overt "messages." I suspect it's not [...]

Robb Hunter likes to give his neighbors a heads up before he starts firing automatic weapons in his house.
He’ll call up his neighbor, Carolyn, who runs a wind-chime business out of her home in their Fairfax neighborhood, and say, “‘I’m testing a fully automatic machine gun up here. Tell me if you can hear this.’ [...]

Comments Off on Duel Purpose: For Fight Choreographer Robb Hunter, Bleeding Is Fundamental

As the Source Festival's short-play showcase "Afterward" makes clear, writing in short form has its challenges. Occasionally, that becomes all too evident in some of these short works, which the festival broadly tasked with "examin[ing] the past through the lens of the present." But the showcase's most successful pieces were those that offered a sense of [...]

Walking into Source Festival's Uncle Cory’s Secret Playtime brought me back to the days of watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? as a kid in the '90s. That Nickelodeon show packed a whole lot of tremors into just its short introduction: an empty boat rocking, children giggling, shutters rattling during a storm, a demonic-looking toy [...]